Removing snapshots for dots because they think everyone uses a F**king addon to manage them is dumb.... If the future encounters are anything like SoO you're probably gonna use bloody thrash on almost every fight anyways so i wouldn't worry about the other two.

cg1351 wrote:Removing snapshots for dots because they think everyone uses a F**king addon to manage them is dumb.... If the future encounters are anything like SoO you're probably gonna use bloody thrash on almost every fight anyways so i wouldn't worry about the other two.

I honestly don't think that's the primary reason. As someone stated earlier in the thread, it made far too much of a delta between the average player and the top players. That makes balancing a nightmare.

I love a lot of the things that were announced, but I do not like what the following adds up to:

- not many new abilities on the way to 100- DoT snapshotting removed- Savagery talent removing the need to manage Savage Roar- exp/hit gone- no more reforging, fewer enchants and gems

Ferals don't play their class because they like things easy. Most of us enjoy the complexity, the challenge of tracking everything and reacting to it. The fact that I'm not great at that just yet leaves me lots of room to improve, and that's what keeps me playing with a certain amount of fanaticism. I also love fiddling with my gear and maxing it out. Some people do enjoy that kind of thing.

Also, since I'm not in a guild that brings down all heroics within a few weeks (or ever - lol), I guess I'll spend more time waiting for that BiS piece because I can't adjust and reforge a ton of haste, for example. Hmph.

ShmooDude wrote:I honestly don't think that's the primary reason. As someone stated earlier in the thread, it made far too much of a delta between the average player and the top players. That makes balancing a nightmare.

But wasn't that their declared goal? To make it so everyone who had the basic rotation down could do decent dps, but superior skill would be rewarded by top dps?

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

The difference between good and bad players should be made even bigger, the game is getting easier and easier and it's just depressing. So what i'll be 5-10% above someone that rerolls feral in the next expansion when i've been playing it for 6-7 years? How is that reasonable or desirable :S

Do you guys seriously think that clipping DoTs defines your skill as a feral? Anyone can do a single target rotation, and with the work we have collectively done on the rotation, both in simulations and also via move suggesters such as Ovale, it is trivial to clip DoTs at the proper time, even when it seems counterintuitive.

The great ferals focus on fight mechanics and what they can do to optimize their dps in all phases, and also what other things they can do to get bosses down (healing, CC, etc.). Spend some time talking to the ferals who consistently top the meters across multiple fights and then you will get an appreciation for what makes them great players.

Long before we had DoT clipping, we had the most complex rotation in the game. What we have done with the tools in MoP has gotten ridiculous. The current advanced rotation is not playable without tools - and any of you who are not using tools to track when to clip DoTs are likely leaving 10-15% of your potential dps on the table.

Because of snapshots and DoT clipping we have basically engaged in an arms race with Blizzard, where they keep trying to tune the classes to be in a general range and we keep doing everything we can to leverage game mechanics to push our dps above that range. The end result - ferals can now put out the highest single target dps in the game (we won that arms race), offset by mediocre AoE.

Playing a feral will still be challenging without constant tool-driven DoT clipping. The biggest change will be in the tools, where we can strip out large portions of the code that are devoted to constantly calculating when to clip a DoT, which from the posts I have been reading about Rake usage, is almost non-stop in the current tier.

Leafkiller wrote:Do you guys seriously think that clipping DoTs defines your skill as a feral? Anyone can do a single target rotation, and with the work we have collectively done on the rotation, both in simulations and also via move suggesters such as Ovale, it is trivial to clip DoTs at the proper time, even when it seems counterintuitive.

I strongly doubt that the simulator action lists are even close to the optimal clipping behavior.

I don't even care that much about snapshotting behavior (feral was fun before and after this clipping was a major part of the rotation), but to claim that the skill of DoT clipping is trivialized by a move suggester is ridiculous.

Last edited by Stenhaldi on Sun Nov 10, 2013 5:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

Nah, Leafy, not at all - no one of the changes is huge, it's like I said the combination of all of them that worries me a little. It's no biggie either - I still love everything else I've heard. It's just a concern.

Last edited by Sibylle on Sun Nov 10, 2013 5:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

Sibylle wrote:- not many new abilities on the way to 100- DoT snapshotting removed- Savagery talent removing the need to manage Savage Roar- exp/hit gone- no more reforging, fewer enchants and gems

The only one of those that would really impact us all that much is the DoT snapshotting. It's also possible they won't do that to bleeds. Bleeds often get different treatment than caster dots. It's also entirely possible we won't be as bleed centric next expansion. We really just won't know how it's going to play out until we into beta.

We're probably also going to see some changes with Shred and Mangle. One of them will either disappear or they will likely change how we use them as Shed is rumored to no longer be a directional ability. It's also possible we'll get to add moonfire to the list of our abilities adding yet another dot for us to manage. I wouldn't worry about complexity. There is still plenty of it to go around and I kind of doubt we were going to see another RoR anyways.

Stenhaldi wrote:I strongly doubt that the simulator action lists are even close to the optimal clipping behavior.

I don't even care that much about snapshotting behavior (feral was fun before and after this clipping was a major part of the rotation), but to claim that the skill of DoT clipping is trivialized by a move suggester is ridiculous.

The move suggester may not be perfect, but it is (most likely) very good*. Most players will see significant increases in their dps by blindly following the script. Over the years I have encountered push back from various players and theory crafters on the results from the sims, particularly when the results seemed non-intuitive, but the sims have been pretty reliable, subject to the imagination of the people writing the sim scripts (and those who provide regular feedback and suggestions including many helpful people on this forum). We can do a good job of judging the accuracy of the sim tools (and they are good) and a fair job of optimizing a single target rotation to push out more dps, and this does simplify the single target play for ferals of any skill level.

I don't doubt that you have found ways to push out more dps than the scripts, but you are playing at an elite level that 99.9% of the players will never experience. By extrapolation, it is likely that you have very fast reflexes and way above average visual tracking which gives you a decided advantage over the rest of us when it comes to reacting to raid mechanics and executing effective rotations. In other words, you benefit less from the move suggester than most. For most people it does trivialize dealing with DoT clipping. Unfortunately, as you know better than most, single target dps is just one of many skills needed in raiding.

I do wholeheartedly agree with you that feral was fun before DoT clipping and will be fun after (I raided as a feral/resto hybrid in vanilla and have played full-time feral since BC made it viable).

* Given that I stopped playing in January, my knowledge of the current script is out of date.

Stenhaldi wrote:I strongly doubt that the simulator action lists are even close to the optimal clipping behavior.

I don't even care that much about snapshotting behavior (feral was fun before and after this clipping was a major part of the rotation), but to claim that the skill of DoT clipping is trivialized by a move suggester is ridiculous.

The move suggester may not be perfect, but it is (most likely) very good*. Most players will see significant increases in their dps by blindly following the script. .

I can confirm this as I pretty much blindly follow the move suggestions of ovale and rank pretty much every fight. Only when the fight deviates from single target do I generally override ovale. That's part of the reason I spend so much time enhancing the script.

Pretty much anytime a feral whispers me for help with their rotation, the first thing I have them do is setup ovale. Most of them see significant improvements in their DPS after getting used to it.

Not saying I won't miss DoT snapshotting though. Also, DoC might still work as a snapshot, either that or it will have see a change in functionality.

I'm not a fan of removing shapshotting. I also use very basic tools, some weak auras for procs and bad kitty. I've been playing Feral since vanilla but I've never used Ovale. I don't consider myself a top Feral but I never felt it would improve my DPS. However I will give it a try and let you know.

teddabear wrote:I'm not a fan of removing shapshotting. I also use very basic tools, some weak auras for procs and bad kitty. I've been playing Feral since vanilla but I've never used Ovale. I don't consider myself a top Feral but I never felt it would improve my DPS. However I will give it a try and let you know.

@teddabear - Make sure you get Nerien's Ovale Scripts along with Ovale so you can get the latest version of the "Leafkiller's" script which is currently being maintained/updated by ShmooDude and Aggixx. That is where the sophisticated snapshotting code is implemented.

@ShmooDude - Agreed about DoC, they will have to decide whether or not to continue to snapshot its bonus or change its mechanics. Looks like the rotation will undergo another major overhaul in this next expansion, not unlike what we went through with MoP.

teddabear wrote:I'm not a fan of removing shapshotting. I also use very basic tools, some weak auras for procs and bad kitty. I've been playing Feral since vanilla but I've never used Ovale. I don't consider myself a top Feral but I never felt it would improve my DPS. However I will give it a try and let you know.

@teddabear - Make sure you get Nerien's Ovale Scripts along with Ovale so you can get the latest version of the "Leafkiller's" script which is currently being maintained/updated by ShmooDude and Aggixx. That is where the sophisticated snapshotting code is implemented.

@ShmooDude - Agreed about DoC, they will have to decide whether or not to continue to snapshot its bonus or change its mechanics. Looks like the rotation will undergo another major overhaul in this next expansion, not unlike what we went through with MoP.

Well we get major overhauls every expansion so that's not a surprise (in fact, it has been getting better and better). The one thing I'm worried about though is that as far as MoP is concerned, they've been wearing "purple-colored-glasses" for quite some time in regards to DoC/HotW (nerf, buff, nerf, buff, nerf, buff) up to the point that they waited 2-3 patches to even considering changing either of them (due to complexity, being broken, etc.) which was too little too late. I believe the idea was that with being past the MoP<->WoD midpoint, they'd revise it then (along with broken bear AM). I'm just worried they didn't learn anything from past mistakes.

A bit offtopic, but my wish list for WoD atm:- New passive: When your Rake ticks, increases the damage of your next Ferocious Bite by 20%, stacking up to 5 times. (numbers PH of course)- Mangle removed.- Shred has no positional requirement and costs 35 energy.- Berserk only reduces energy cost by 40% but now also increases damage dealt by 20%.- Dream of Cenarius actually having raid utility in a tier of talents that are supposed to give raid utility.

Honestly, I'm actually happy if they can remove snapshotting and give us another mechanic to take it's place in terms of complexity. Generally I'm up for anything that makes the spec harder but snapshotting was kind of a dumb way for that to happen. If they take out snapshotting and give us nothing to take its place and the spec becomes duller for it, then yeah I'll be a bit more than upset.

And yeah, their design philosophy for us this expansion has been weird as hell to say the least.

ShmooDude wrote:I can confirm this as I pretty much blindly follow the move suggestions of ovale and rank pretty much every fight. Only when the fight deviates from single target do I generally override ovale. That's part of the reason I spend so much time enhancing the script.

Ranking doesn't mean a whole lot for such a poorly populated spec, unless you're talking very good ranks. I don't doubt you can do reasonably well, better than most players even, with the script. It would also be silly to claim that it isn't possible in principle for a script to perform optimally. But while I've not looked at the move suggester script, if it's similar to the simulationcraft script then I'm pretty confident in saying it's far from optimal, at least for non-DoC (it may be closer for DoC due to the rotation being more rigid).

Independently of that point though (and the following is more addressed at Leafkiller), suppose the move suggester did produce optimal results for sustained damage against a single target. You could use the earlier argument -- that the rotation is trivialized by move suggesters -- to say that there's no point in having any rotational complexity at all. Should you? You speak of fight mechanics and optimizing damage in all phases, but DoT clipping is like any other piece of rotational complexity in that you have to adapt it to the fight.

If bleed snapshotting were still in, I'd advocate changing mangle cost to ~30 or shred cost to ~50 to differentiate them more. But without bleed snapshotting, precise resource management isn't as important, and it's probably fine to just consolidate shred and mangle.

aggixx wrote:A bit offtopic, but my wish list for WoD atm:- New passive: When your Rake ticks, increases the damage of your next Ferocious Bite by 20%, stacking up to 5 times. (numbers PH of course)- Mangle removed.- Shred has no positional requirement and costs 35 energy.- Berserk only reduces energy cost by 40% but now also increases damage dealt by 20%.- Dream of Cenarius actually having raid utility in a tier of talents that are supposed to give raid utility.

Honestly, I'm actually happy if they can remove snapshotting and give us another mechanic to take it's place in terms of complexity. Generally I'm up for anything that makes the spec harder but snapshotting was kind of a dumb way for that to happen. If they take out snapshotting and give us nothing to take its place and the spec becomes duller for it, then yeah I'll be a bit more than upset.

And yeah, their design philosophy for us this expansion has been weird as hell to say the least.

As I've posted on MMO-C, if they're removing bleed snapshotting I'd assume that - with all other abilities being relatively equal - our dots will suffer from high RNG variance and should thus be adjusted back to WotlK levels where shred/mangle and autoattacks were quite high on our damage percentage (armor-pen era).

The scenario above is quite bland, however - to make it more challenging my wishlist for WoD would be something like this:

Similar to balance eclipses; you can manually shift or trigger your mastery into either high bleed damage/ticks or high direct damage on bleeding targets - perhaps triggered passively with aggix's idea on tick/application - so that you could start off applying bleeds and by doing so your direct damage abilities would becomes stronger on bleeding targets (thus making bleed-cleave and aoe swiping more efficient) until using a finisher or new ability which increase the tick damage and duration of your next rake/rip (synergy with DoC) but drops all your DD-increasing stacks.

You would then rotate this to keep high-optimum bleeds rolling or spamming bleeds by bleadcleaving in order to remain with high DD-stacks for target-swapping fights, ie. soul swap or bloody-thrash an initial bleed then go nuts with an empowered shred/fb combo)

I could see the Savagery talent possible being useful if you have a stream of lower health adds. Might allow you to get rips up on all of them, rather than having to use some of the points on Roars. Mind you, the moonfire talent might be better in this situation anyway.

RareBeast wrote:I could see the Savagery talent possible being useful if you have a stream of lower health adds. Might allow you to get rips up on all of them, rather than having to use some of the points on Roars. Mind you, the moonfire talent might be better in this situation anyway.

Not knowing how core abilities will look like @100 in WoD this is pure speculation for the time being. For all we know Lunar Inspiration (Touch of Elune) might not even be intended for Damage (ie. lack of AP/mastery scaling) and might be intended for downtime combo point generation (ranged boss mechanics, chasing someone in pvp)

Edit: we need to keep in mind that talent tiers are usually divided into specific roles. T1 is the movement tier, T4 is the damage/burst tier, T6 is the "utility tier" (with DoC being a high-damage bastard child with low utility for ferals) and T7 is turning out to be the resource management tier: no CP/energy required to roar, no CP/energy required for aoe, ranged combo point generation. Granted, some of the talents double as performance-perks, especially for Guardians and Boomkins but overall gist of it seems to be sound. We'll have to wait and see what the closed beta brings.

ShmooDude wrote:I can confirm this as I pretty much blindly follow the move suggestions of ovale and rank pretty much every fight. Only when the fight deviates from single target do I generally override ovale. That's part of the reason I spend so much time enhancing the script.

Ranking doesn't mean a whole lot for such a poorly populated spec, unless you're talking very good ranks. I don't doubt you can do reasonably well, better than most players even, with the script. It would also be silly to claim that it isn't possible in principle for a script to perform optimally. But while I've not looked at the move suggester script, if it's similar to the simulationcraft script then I'm pretty confident in saying it's far from optimal, at least for non-DoC (it may be closer for DoC due to the rotation being more rigid).

Independently of that point though (and the following is more addressed at Leafkiller), suppose the move suggester did produce optimal results for sustained damage against a single target. You could use the earlier argument -- that the rotation is trivialized by move suggesters -- to say that there's no point in having any rotational complexity at all. Should you? You speak of fight mechanics and optimizing damage in all phases, but DoT clipping is like any other piece of rotational complexity in that you have to adapt it to the fight.

We may be "poorly populated" but we're not non-existant. Any given week there's 5000 or so feral boss kills logged on 25 man heroic so getting top 150 is not insignificant.

Also I am 75th+ percentile or higher on most fights with several 95th parses.

I'm not saying I will ever rank #1 with the script, but I sure as hell get most of the way there. EDIT: As HotW+SotF

Last edited by ShmooDude on Sun Nov 10, 2013 9:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Stenhaldi wrote:Independently of that point though (and the following is more addressed at Leafkiller), suppose the move suggester did produce optimal results for sustained damage against a single target. You could use the earlier argument -- that the rotation is trivialized by move suggesters -- to say that there's no point in having any rotational complexity at all. Should you? You speak of fight mechanics and optimizing damage in all phases, but DoT clipping is like any other piece of rotational complexity in that you have to adapt it to the fight.

Move suggesters do trivialize the single target rotation and it would certainly be reasonable if Blizzard decided to make changes to the WoW api to make the move suggesters harder to write. But if they did that, then they would also need to take a good look at all of the current mechanics and simplify those mechanics that are very hard to deal with in the absence of addons. In any event, most fights require a lot more than just single target dps and move suggesters do make raiding a lot more accessible to new players, so I would not recommend that Blizz try to remove them from the game.

Let me provide a better explanation of why I don't like the DoT snapshotting. Despite the fact that I spent some years working on the Ovale scripts, at times contributing to others who maintained the script, and at times being the primary maintainer of the script, I believe that the rotation should be playable with minimal addon support, at least at a level where dps is at the 90% level. If we take snapshotting out of the game right now, there will still be at least a 10% difference between ok players and the exceptional players. With snapshotting in the game, the difference is higher, and when you combine snapshotting with powerful procs, it becomes difficult to play an optimum rotation without sophisticated addons.

For example, you hit TF and right before it expires, you put up a Rake. Immediately after the TF expires, you get a trinket proc. Depending on the damage differential between the trinket proc and TF you might want to refresh your Rake, or you might want to let it ride and use other fillers. This might depend on how you are reforged, or the ilvl of your other gear. In other words, without specific theorycrafting of the relative value of the trinket and your current gear compared to TF, it is not always obvious what the correct rotational action is. I don't believe that players should be required to do that level of theorycrafting in order to play their toons at a half way decent level. People who do have the inclination and the time to invest in theorycrafting etc., should be rewarded for their efforts and produce higher numbers, with a current target of about 10% more (per GC). I feel that snapshotting makes the gap larger than it should be. Further, I think the 10% differential is easily covered by better play throughout an encounter even with two players who can do equal damage on a single target (in other words, even if a player using Ovale was equal to you in single target dps, your reflexes plus deeper understanding of the fight mechanics would still put you 10% ahead of them in dps on most fights).

Ah, yes it's completely fair to object to the fact that snapshotting is opaque to the default UI. If it were to stay, I would be certainly be arguing that DoT strength should show up in the default UI somewhere.

Alpheus wrote:Edit: we need to keep in mind that talent tiers are usually divided into specific roles. T1 is the movement tier, T4 is the damage/burst tier, T6 is the "utility tier" (with DoC being a high-damage bastard child with low utility for ferals) and T7 is turning out to be the resource management tier: no CP/energy required to roar, no CP/energy required for aoe, ranged combo point generation. Granted, some of the talents double as performance-perks, especially for Guardians and Boomkins but overall gist of it seems to be sound. We'll have to wait and see what the closed beta brings.

I would argue that would be an extraordinarily shitty excuse for a talent in a PvE context, so I would hope they have more common sense then that. The other two talents in the tier are clearly performance enhancing.

Leafkiller wrote:Spend some time talking to the ferals who consistently top the meters across multiple fights and then you will get an appreciation for what makes them great players.

Who would i speak to? I raided in method and envy as feral and at times have had rank1 on every progression fight (hc). Who are you again? Removing snapshot dots is fucking retarded and no you do not need (playforyou)addons like ovale or weak aura scripts to track a dot you've put up yourself within the last 15~ seconds... I manage just fine knowing when my trinkets have proc'd. Maybe they should ban your addons that do way too much for you and blizzards whole argument of ''requires mod that simply tells you what to do'' argument goes down the drain and i still get to play how i am now. Ofc that is not all there is to a feral but it's become a very strong part of our dps and the rest we've always done/should know already. With this change and that retarded savagery talent i feel like alot more random ferals who can't keep up atm will start competing and this is sad as ferals complexity is the only reason i still play this dying game.